The Story of the Upper Canada Rebellion by John Charles Dent (short novels in english .TXT) 📖

he was to be relied upon to uphold any policy which they might see fit to dictate. Official dignitaries granted lands to their servants and other dependants, and, as soon as certain requisite forms had been complied with, these lands were transferred to themselves or their children. In other cases persons were actually hired by the month to draw land and perform the settlement duties, after which the land was conveyed to their employers. Having the run of the official books, these cormorants contrived in one way and another to acquire for themselves and their creatures all the best lands in the Province, either wholly for nothing or at a price which was merely nominal. "The keys of office," says a writer already quoted from, "were held by themselves or friends, and no admittance to their secrets was allowed except to the initiated, whose favourable out-of-door statements could be relied on. Never since the Norman invasion of England was there such a wholesale partition of plunder."[37] Many persons owned or controlled, directly or indirectly, entire townships.[38] Others owned thousands of acres which they had never seen. As the taxes imposed on unsettled lands were trifling, these immense tracts were no appreciable expense to their owners, who could hold them from year to year, until the progress of settlement rendered them of immense value. Such progress was inevitable, for though these huge reservations tended to keep back the country, settlers obtained grants of adjoining lands, and their labours could not fail to increase the value of all contiguous territory. The Home District, including the most valuable portion of Upper Canada, was especially afflicted by these wholesale reservations, but every part of the Province was more or leas crippled by them.
The ruling faction and their favourites, not satisfied with the enormous direct and indirect grants of lands which they managed in one way and another to obtain, availed themselves of every opportunity to buy up land which had been granted to persons who had expended their little all on their properties, and had thereby become impoverished. Among these latter were many half-pay officers and others of good birth but limited means, who had sought homes for themselves in the Canadian wilderness. Not a few had been compelled to sell their commissions in order to obtain the wherewithal to settle themselves and their families on the lands granted to them. Finding themselves cut off from society, and ill-suited to face the privations of pioneer life, they became discouraged, and sold their lands for whatever meagre price they could get. The land-jobbers were ever on the alert to buy up these tracts at a few shillings an acre, not with any intention of settling upon or improving them, but solely for the purpose of holding them for an increased value. The grants to the children of U. E. Loyalists were the constant subjects of bargain and sale, and wrought great evil to the Province without producing any corresponding benefit to the recipients. Very few of the lots so granted were ever occupied by the grantees, most of whom were young persons of both sexes who resided with their parents, and had no inclination to set up for themselves in the wilderness. These grants were frequently sold at ridiculously low prices. From two to five pounds was an ordinary price for a lot of two hundred acres. Mr. John Radenhurst, who was Chief Clerk in the office of the Surveyor-General for many years, is entitled to speak on this subject with authority. In his evidence taken before Lord Durham's Commissioner, in 1838, he states that the general price paid by speculators for the two-hundred-acre lots granted to sons and daughters of U. E. Loyalists was "from a gallon of rum up to perhaps six pounds." In answer to another question, he states that while millions of acres were granted in this way, the settlement of the Province was not advanced, nor the advantage of the grantee secured in the manner that may be supposed to have been contemplated by Government. He mentions the Honourable Robert Hamilton, a member of the Legislative Council, and the two Chief Justices, Elmsley and Powell, as among the largest purchasers of these lands. Mr. Hamilton's acquisitions amounted to about a hundred thousand acres.[39] Elmsley and Powell, in addition to the five thousand acres which each of them had obtained for nothing as members of the Executive Council, managed to acquire quantities of land which, had they been brought together in one spot, would have made a township of average size. Thus was monopoly perpetuated and increased from year to year, and thus were large tracts of the Provincial territory maintained in a state of primitive wilderness.
Intimations of the gigantic abuses existing in the land-granting system of Upper Canada were more than once sent across the Atlantic to the Colonial Secretary, who instructed the Lieutenant-Governor to impose certain regulations with a view to preventing the continuous repetition of injustice. The Colonial Office, however, was more than three thousand miles away, and means were easily found for evading any restrictions imposed at such a distance. Some idea of the extent which the evil had attained in the year 1818 may be derived from the two passages in that very petition to the Prince Regent for which Mr. Gourlay was indicted at Kingston and Brockville, as related in the preceding chapter. "The lands of the Crown in Upper Canada," proceeds the petition, "are of immense extent, not only stretching far and wide into the wilderness, but scattered over the Province, and intermixed with private property already cultivated. The disposal of this land is left to ministers at home, who are palpably ignorant of existing circumstances, and to a council of men resident in the Province, who, it is believed, have long converted the trust reposed in them to purposes of selfishness. The scandalous abuses in this department came some years ago to such a pitch of monstrous magnitude that the Home ministers wisely imposed restrictions upon the Land Council of Upper Canada. These, however, have by no means removed the evil; and a system of patronage and favouritism, in the disposal of the Crown Lands, still exists; altogether destructive of moral rectitude and virtuous feeling in the management of public affairs. Corruption, indeed, has reached such a height in this Province that it is thought no other part of the British Empire witnesses the like, and it is vain to look for improvement until a radical change is effected. It matters not what characters fill situations of public trust at present--all sink beneath the dignity of men--become vitiated and weak, as soon as they are placed within the vortex of destruction. Confusion on confusion has grown out of this unhappy system; and the very lands of the Crown, the giving away of which has created such mischief and iniquity, have ultimately come to little value from abuse. The poor subjects of His Majesty, driven from home by distress, to whom portions of land are granted, can now find in the grant no benefit; and Loyalists of the United Empire--the descendants of those who sacrificed their all in America in behalf of British rule--men whose names were ordered on record for their virtuous adherence to your Royal Father--the descendants of these men find now no favour in their destined rewards; nay, these rewards, when granted, have in many cases been rendered worse than nothing, for the legal rights in the enjoyment of them have been held at nought; their land has been rendered unsaleable, and, in some cases, only a source of distraction and care. Under this system of internal management, and weakened from other evil influences, Upper Canada now pines in comparative decay; discontent and poverty are experienced in a land supremely blessed with the gifts of nature; dread of arbitrary power wars, here, against the free exercise of reason and manly sentiment; laws have been set aside; legislators have come into derision; and contempt from the mother-country seems fast gathering strength to disunite the people of Canada from their friends at home." Notwithstanding these long, involved, awkwardly-constructed sentences, there is no more accurate picture to be found anywhere of the effect of the pernicious administration of affairs in the Public Lands Office at York in 1818. Twenty years later Lord Durham found it not much improved.[40]
Another hydra-headed monster which ate into the very vitals of the commonwealth was the provision for the clergy, known as the Clergy Reserves. This was perhaps the greatest of all the curses imposed upon Upper Canada by the Constitutional Act, for its ill effects were both direct and incidental. It not only tended to stop the march of progress, but it created a degree of sectarian animosity and hatred little calculated to inspire respect for Christianity in the breasts of the secular portion of the community, and it disturbed the public tranquillity for nearly two generations.
By the thirty-sixth section of the Act of 1791, power was given to reserve out of all future grants of land in Upper and Lower Canada, as well as in respect of all past grants, an allotment for the support of "a Protestant Clergy." It was provided that this allotment should be "equal in value to the seventh part of the lands so granted." By the thirty-seventh section, the rents, profits and emoluments arising from the lands so appropriated were to be applicable solely to the maintenance and support of a Protestant Clergy. By subsequent sections provision was made for the erection and endowment by the Lieutenant-Governor, under instructions from the Crown, of parsonages or rectories, one or more in every township or parish, according to the establishment of the Church of England, and for the presentation of incumbents, subject to the bishop's right of institution. By section forty-two it was enacted that no Provincial statute varying or repealing these provisions should receive the royal assent until thirty days after it had been laid before both Houses of Parliament in Great Britain. These famous enactments were destined to produce more discord and heartburning than all the other clauses of the Constitutional Act combined. They were destined to make the Church of England more cordially detested in this Province by persons without the pale of her communion than she has ever been in any other part of the world. They were destined to set one Legislative faction against another in such fierce array that the public business frequently had to be suspended. They were destined to divide the Provincial population into two hostile camps, each filled with envy, malice and all uncharitableness towards the other. They were destined to be the key-note of general elections, and to shape the policy of successive Administrations. They were destined to be the chief factor in bringing about a Rebellion which for a time seriously disturbed the industries of the Province; which filled the Provincial jails with suffering prisoners; which consigned a number of persons to a premature and ignominous death; which brought sorrow and ruin to many a once happy fireside; which bequeathed a legacy of hatred to the children of those who took part in it; and which seriously disturbed the international amity between Great Britain and the United States.
It may be doubted whether all the ill effects of these appropriations were foreseen by their promoters in the early years of our history. It was at all events some time before those effects began to be apparent to the people generally. In making the appropriations, care was taken that the reserved lands should be intermixed with grants to actual settlers, whereby they were spread over a large area; the manifest intention being to increase their value by their proximity to cultivated farms, and at the same time to create a tenantry in the settled townships, with a view to the creation of parishes and the endowment of rectories. In several portions of the Province, however, it was impossible to follow